Education for Children with Special Needs: A Comparative Study of Education Systems and Parental Guidance Services

The general and universal right to education has been well established for some time. But despite international agreement, the commitment to education for all is not necessarily linked to obligatory mainstream education for all children with disabilities. The mature European countries have a history of segregating children with special educational needs in special schools and special schools continue to exist in many countries. In addition, initiatives towards more inclusive education systems are taken. So in many countries, children with special needs and their parents are able to choose between segregated special education and inclusive education. However, different factors influence this choice. Using existing research, country profiles and results of analyses on Flemish data, this paper compares the organisation of inclusive and special education systems in the Flemish community of Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and England. We add a perspective to the existing comparative studies. We proceed from the Network Episode Model developed by Pescosolido (and the importance of the social networks included within this model), focusing specifically on the guidance systems for the social networks of children with special educational needs within the education. The results describe that the choice for a certain school type is influenced by a number of factors, including the country’s education system, the guidance and the characteristics and competences of the family and its social network. Social and socio-economic factors are relevant within the educational field of children with special educational needs. Policy-makers should consider the potential influence of these factors on the overall effectiveness of the measures introduced.